Source: Rich DeVaul, a director at X, Alphabet's moonshot unit, left the company today following reports of sexual harassment, did not receive an exit package
Rich DeVaul, a director at X, the moonshot unit of Alphabet, Google's parent company, has left the company following reports of sexual harassment.
Context & Ripple Effects
Days before this report, Sundar Pichai told employees in an [[a:934913|email that Google had fired 48 people, including 13 senior managers, over two years for sexual harassment]] — and that none of them received exit packages. DeVaul's departure from X, with no exit package, is the first named director-level case to surface under that policy.
The case also echoes a longer arc: Amit Singhal had earlier left Google amid a harassment dispute and resurfaced at Uber before being forced out there too, making cross-company accountability for quietly exited executives a live issue in Silicon Valley.
First-order effects
- DeVaul leaves X as a director with no exit package, aligning his case with the no-severance standard Pichai laid out for harassment firings.
Second-order effects
- The precedent raises pressure on Alphabet to apply the same standard to its most senior leaders — a year later it hired an outside law firm to probe executives including Chief Legal Officer David Drummond over inappropriate relationships (the Drummond probe).
Third-order effects
- If the no-exit-package rule holds, quiet departures with severance stop being the default handling for harassment cases in tech, forcing companies to either document misconduct formally or defend why a given executive was treated differently.
The trend: Tech companies are replacing quiet, compensated exits for harassment cases with documented firings and no severance, raising the bar for how senior executives are held accountable.